How to boost your productivity using 5 apps that work directly with Evernote

With more than a 100 million customers, Evernote is a popular and powerful cloud-based productivity tool that works with mobile phones, tablets, computers and Internet browsers. Evernote allows you to keep notes, audio notes, photos, reminders and to-do-lists all in one place. Notes can as short as a single line or as long as hundred of pages. Each note is stored in a custom named folder and can be tagged with many names for quick search and discovery.

For new users, Evernote has an online video tutorial page that covers the basics of getting started as well as more advanced features.

Evernote has a free and a paid versions.

The free version supports the following features:

Monthly uploads of 60MB per month, which is more than enough if you use mainly text with few photos and audio notes.

Online notebooks only. This means notes can only be access online through Wi-Fi or data.

Text and handwritten recognition

Others can view your notes and notebooks, but not edit them.

Text and handwritten recognition.

Attach files such as power points and PDFs.

The paid version supports these features:

Monthly uploads of 1GB per month

Offline notebooks – notes can be downloaded to a device or computer for offline writing and reading.

Note history – supporting viewing and exporting older versions of a note

Faster image recognition

Hide promotions

Top priority technical support

Allow other users to edit your notes

Larger files, bigger notes – 25MB for free versus 100MB for paid

Pin lock: iOS and Android users can add a lock for security

PDF search: search through your PDF files inside Evernote.

I want to describe 5 essential apps and tools that integrate with Evernote that will improve your productivity.

Evernote integrates with many other Evernote approved productivity apps through its Trunk collections. The app collections cover business, lifestyle, productivity, paperless and education.

1. Evernote Web Clipper:

This is a simple free web browser extension that makes it easy and quick to mark up, share and store text, articles, photos and webpages on the Internet. The extension works with Google Chrome, Safari and Opera. Each stored document is called a note in Evernote and is fully searchable and available on all devices. Web Clipper is also useful for taking screenshots of a website, adding comments and markups. The web clips can be saved and shared with friends and colleagues by email or through social networking sites. Web Clipper is available here and a tutorial is here.

2. Evernote Clearly

This is a Google Chrome and Firefox extension that eliminates ads and makes web articles easy to read. It saves articles to Evernote and supports listening with text to speech. It allows you to personalize how you see a webpage by adjusting the background, font size and reading for day or nighttime. It also supports highlighting of articles that can be saved to Evernote. The Evernote Clearly tutorial video is available here and the extension is here.

3. Evernote Hello

For those of us who get overwhelmed by business cards, Evernote Hello is an app for iOS and Android devices. It makes it easy to scan business cards and store contact information inside Evernote, one note per business card. Evernote’s partnership with LinkedIn captures the person’s LinkedIn contact information with their profile photo and their profile website link. It also allows you to send a LinkedIn request without visiting LinkedIn. A note with business card information is created for each contact person. Additional notes can be add after each conversation with the contact. One additional nifty feature is that Evernote supports setting reminders for any note. A business card note in Evernote can be turned into an action by setting a follow-up reminder on a day and time in the future for that contact.

4. CloudMagic

CloudMagic is a free email app that is available from iOS and Android. CloudMagic cards act as an add-on for Evernote and other third party services like Trello, Saleforce and Pocket to help manage and complete workflow. For example, you double-tap on any email message to call the CloudMagic user interface. Then you pick a service like Evernote and save the email’s contents directly to Evernote. Email articles can be copied from CloudMagic’s interface into Evernote, Pocket and a number of other supported apps. CloudMagic for Evernote is available here and a tutorial is here.

5. CamScanner

CamScanner is an iOS and Android app that turns a mobile or tablet device into a portable document scanning device. It uses the camera on your device to scan documents, notes, receipts or anything you wish. After taking one or more photos, options include image adjustments, multipage PDF conversion, sharing, printing and collaborating on documents. CamScanner has optical character recognition, which makes all scanned text searchable and editable. CamScanner syncs with Evernote for easy storage of all scanned documents. The premium version costs $4.99 per month or $49.99 per year and lets you share documents with more people and removes ads and watermarks. CamScanner is available here.